AMD's eighth generation core is scheduled for a mid-2002 debut. From what we have heard, the "pipeline will support aggressive clock speed scaling," so we should expect a deeper pipeline than the current K7 family, similar to what Intel has implemented with the Pentium 4. Additionally, AMD has voiced the desire to move into the mobile market with the first generation Hammer processor, Clawhammer.

Since AMD plans to sample Clawhammer around the same time as Thoroughbred, it is safe to assume that AMD's eighth generation will debut at .13-micron. Interestingly enough, Clawhammer will be no larger than 100 square millimeters - smaller than current K7 processors and about half the size of Intel's Pentium 4.

From the looks of it, Clawhammer will be the most versatile processor in AMD's history. High-end processors will make their way into single and dual processor servers, while the low end will cover the mobile market.

Sledgehammer is the second member of the Hammer family, and is targeted towards 4-8 way servers. Featuring a large L2 cache, DDR SDRAM support and Lightning Data Transport (LDT), AMD hopes to give Intel's Itanium a run for the money, though we'd tend to place the two processors in slightly different markets.

One of the most significant additions to the K8 architecture is a set of 64-bit registers known as x86-64, which will allow the Hammer processors to run a 64-bit operating system and 64-bit applications with 32-bit backwards compatibility. In other words, 32-bit applications will not suffer because of the added 64-bit capabilities.

It should be understood that 64-bit processors would benefit massive database traversals (we're talking 10GB or so), simulations (the thermodynamic engineering type, not Falcon 4.0), and encryption applications. Given that Clawhammer is being aimed across a very broad market, we expect very few people will take advantage of the x86-64 technology. Systems shipping with Sledgehammer will be much better suited to 64-bit computing, but it remains to be seen whether AMD will successfully execute plans for 4-8 way systems.